Sharing Yerba Mate

How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region

By: Rebekah E. Pite

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Hardcover | 19 September 2023

At a Glance

Hardcover
310 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 15.5

Hardcover

$296.75

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Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. In lively prose and with vivid illustrations, Rebekah E. Pite explores how this Indigenous infusion, made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of a local holly tree, became one of the most distinctive and widely consumed beverages in the region. Latin American food and commodity studies have focused on consumption in the global north, but Pite tells the story of yerba mate in South America, illuminating dynamic and exploitative circuits of production, promotion, and consumption. Ideas about who should harvest and serve yerba mate, along with visions of the archetypical mate drinker, persisted and were transformed alongside the shifting politics of class, race, and gender.

This global history takes us from the colonial Rio de la Plata to the top yerba-consuming and producing nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with excursions to Chile, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, where yerba mate is now sold as a "superfood." For readers eager to understand South America and its unique drink, Sharing Yerba Mate is an essential text that delves into an everyday ritual to expose systems of power and the taste of belonging.

Industry Reviews

"Pite deftly navigates the changes in late colonial territory to trace how the widespread usage of ka'a crossed social classes . . . [and the book's] excellent visual and written analysis includes a vast number of primary sources produced by writers, painters, and naturalists from Europe and the United States."--H-Diplo

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